PolyU Orientation Camp Themes and Evolution: From O-Camp to Regulatory Formalisation (1990s–2020s)

「理大：不容低俗活动」("PolyU: No Room for Vulgar Activities") — in August 1999, Ming Pao used these five words to set the tone for the first public controversy over PolyU's orientation camp. Twenty-four years later, the University's response had changed little in substance: it became 「筹办方要完成防止性骚扰课程」("organisers must complete an anti-sexual-harassment course"). What lies between is not one scandal, but four.

One-line conclusion: Orientation camps at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) have continued for more than fifty years since the students' union was founded in 1972. Between 1999 and 2007, they made the pages of Ming Pao, Oriental Daily News, Sing Tao Daily and The Sun four times over vulgar games. In 2021 the students' union became the only one still operating normally among Hong Kong's eight major universities^※, only to dissolve the following year; from 2023, PolyU has required organisers to complete the Equal Opportunities Commission's anti-sexual-harassment course before an event may be held^※ — the organising body shifting entirely from student self-governance to administrative approval.

---

# When do the earliest records of PolyU orientation camps begin?

The institutional starting point for PolyU orientation camps traces back to the Hong Kong Polytechnic era. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Students' Union originated as the Hong Kong Polytechnic Students' Union, founded in August 1972; when the Polytechnic was upgraded to university status in 1994, the union was renamed the Hong Kong Polytechnic University Students' Union^※. This means that responsibility for organising orientation camps fell, from the institution's first year, along two lines — the students' union and departmental/faculty societies — rather than with the University administration, which did not directly organise new-student integration activities at the time. That structure persists today, and it is what sets PolyU fundamentally apart from CUHK, where orientation is organised centrally through the college system.

This site was unable to find specific records of orientation activities from the Hong Kong Polytechnic period (1972–1994) in publicly available sources online — an absence of records is not evidence of absence of activity, only an absence of verifiable reporting or surviving archives, and this article makes no inferential reconstruction to fill the gap. The only point that can be confirmed is the founding date of the students' union itself. Orientation-camp controversies that left a public documentary trail did not surface until the late 1990s, after the institution had become a university.

---

# Why did PolyU orientation camps make negative headlines four times between the 1990s and 2000s?

Looking at a single year's negative coverage in isolation, it is easy to treat one incident as a one-off. But placing the four orientation-camp controversies that made the press between 1999 and 2007 side by side produces a different picture — not an isolated accident, but the same underlying problem recurring over nearly a decade.

The four headlines and dates above are cited by this site from the reference list of the Wikipedia entry "Hong Kong Polytechnic University Students' Union"^※. This site was unable to open the original newspaper pages to verify the full text directly, so only the information contained in the headlines and dates is presented here; specific game content is not reproduced. Credibility is marked as "cited via the Wikipedia entry, original not directly verified."

One 2004 report is particularly specific: the then President of PolyU, Poon Chung-kwong, publicly said he was embarrassed by obscene activities at the orientation camp, and PolyU planned to discipline the students involved^※ (as reported via the Wikipedia entry). This is the earliest record this site could find of PolyU's administration publicly commenting on orientation-camp content and considering disciplinary action against individual students. Compared with the "training-course prevention" approach adopted after 2023, the 2004 response looks more like case-by-case accountability — the two reflect different governance logic.

At the same time, PolyU also had a category of orientation activities that fell outside the oversight of the students' union Council. For many years, orientation activities colloquially known as "hidden O" (暗O) have existed — camps held without the approval of the students' union Council^※. The existence of "hidden O" points to a structural problem: even where the students' union itself has an approval process, departmental or faculty societies, or informal groups, could still organise orientation activities of their own outside that oversight. This is part of the institutional background to the University's 2023 move to bring approval authority into the administrative tier and require organisers to complete a certified course — see "Hall Associations and O-Camp: Handling Misconduct, Bullying and Sexual Harassment at Orientation Camps" for a fuller account of post-2023 regulatory detail.

---

# Big O, small O, and "group dads and mums": how are PolyU orientation camps organised?

Understanding how PolyU orientation camps are organised requires clarifying two terms used across Hong Kong universities generally. According to compilations of orientation-camp terminology by Hong Kong online communities, the "big O" (大O) is organised at students'-union or college level, introducing new students to campus life and culture across departments; the "small O" (细O) is organised by departmental or faculty societies, focused on the social network within a single department or faculty^※. PolyU has no college system, so in the PolyU context the "big O" corresponds to orientation camps organised at students'-union level, while the "small O" corresponds to those organised at departmental- or faculty-society level. At the residential-hall level there is a third, parallel line: the Hall O-Camp, organised by individual Hall Associations — the three run in parallel rather than in a hierarchy.

On-the-ground group leaders are known as "group dads" and "group mums" (组爸/组妈), a role filled by senior students, responsible for leading small groups of new students, setting the atmosphere, and maintaining social ties after the event. The "group dad/mum" mechanism is not unique to PolyU; it is a common organisational model across orientation camps at Hong Kong tertiary institutions generally. But it is precisely this combination of emotional bonding and group pressure that a 2023 feature article by the Family Planning Association of Hong Kong identified as the social-psychological basis that has allowed a "sexualised-conduct" (性搞作) culture in orientation camps to persist for decades (see "Hall Associations and O-Camp" for the fuller analysis). This article does not repeat that analytical framework, and notes it here only to explain its relationship to the "big O / small O" organisational structure.

---

# What tensions over resource allocation did the 2001 membership-fee withdrawal episode expose?

Controversy over orientation camps was not confined to the content of the activities themselves — it also bore on how the students' union allocated its finances. According to 2001 media reports, PolyU's students'-union membership fee was the highest among Hong Kong's eight publicly funded tertiary institutions that year, and more than 870 students withdrew their membership that academic year, with some citing dissatisfaction that too much of the budget went to orientation activities at the expense of the welfare of second- and third-year students^※. More than 870 withdrawals, for an organisation of the students' union's limited scale, is a fairly concrete signal of eroding trust — it shows that how much to spend on orientation camps had already become an internal flashpoint within PolyU's student self-governance system by the early 2000s, not merely an external tension between the University and students. The opaque disputes over cabinet finances and orientation-budget allocation are covered in "Cabinet Finances and the Transparency Dispute."

This financial thread also explains why the scale and budget of PolyU orientation camps remained subject to internal checks for years afterwards — not because of University intervention, but because the students'-union General Meeting itself kept a wary eye on orientation spending. This mechanism of student self-oversight disappeared after the students' union's 2021 "broken succession" (断庄) — a later development covered below.

---

# Why does CUHK's 2002 "Four Colleges Assembly" incident matter for PolyU's orientation-camp history?

PolyU's orientation-camp history cannot be understood apart from the wider Hong Kong context. On 23 August 2002, at CUHK's "Four Colleges Assembly" orientation event, Shaw College students displayed a poster of a girl with sexually suggestive content and chanted sexually suggestive slogans; a complainant subsequently lodged a complaint with the University, and the college orientation-camp organising committee issued a public apology^※ — this was a CUHK case, not a PolyU one. But it is widely regarded as the first episode in the history of Hong Kong orientation-camp sexual-harassment controversies to reach public attention with a clear complaint and a University apology. Its timing fell precisely between PolyU's 1999 "no room for vulgar activities" statement and its President's 2004 statement, which suggests that orientation camps across Hong Kong universities were facing similar structural problems during the same period, rather than this being an isolated phenomenon at one institution.

According to the same entry, after the 2002 CUHK incident, the unit responsible for the activity made no major change to its content or format, only switching to collecting the slogan sheets back from new students immediately after the event^※ — a response that removed evidence rather than reformed content, foreshadowing two decades in which orientation-camp oversight remained largely a matter of surface adjustment, until large-scale intervention by the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) in 2023 brought a structural shift.

---

# What do the figures in the EOC's 2019 survey report actually show?

What turned "sexual harassment at orientation camps" from scattered press reports into a territory-wide policy issue was a systematic survey by the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC). According to a briefing the EOC Chairperson submitted to the Legislative Council Panel on Constitutional Affairs in May 2024, the EOC launched a survey on sexual harassment of tertiary students in 2018 and published the report Breaking the Silence: Survey on Sexual Harassment of University Students in Hong Kong in 2019 — the largest study of its kind in Hong Kong, involving nine local universities, with 14,442 students completing an online questionnaire^※.

The survey's core figures are striking: 27% of female students and 18.4% of male students reported having experienced sexual harassment in the preceding 12 months, but 58.6% of students did not know whether their university had an anti-sexual-harassment policy, and among those who had experienced sexual harassment, only 2.5% had formally complained to their university^※. Taken together — an online survey of enrolled students at nine institutions conducted in 2018, published in 2019, with figures of "27% versus 2.5%" — more than a quarter of students reported having experienced harassment, but fewer than one in thirty formally complained. This large gap is the direct basis on which the EOC continued, in the years that followed, to press universities on orientation-camp regulation.

The report subsequently made 16 recommendations directed at tertiary institutions. A 2022 EOC follow-up report found that the nine universities had, on average, implemented 13 of the 16 recommendations, and that all nine had implemented the two recommendations relating to improving complaint-handling mechanisms^※. The implementation rate is not low, but an average of "13 out of 16" also means roughly three recommendations had not been universally adopted. The public briefing does not break this down university by university or specify which recommendations remain unimplemented where; this site could not find institution-by-institution public data and so does not speculate on whether PolyU is among the universities with outstanding items.

The Legislative Council briefing states: 「根據《性別歧視條例》，若教育機構內的學生、職員或負責人對屬同一機構的學生、職員或負責人作出性騷擾，即屬違法」("Under the Sex Discrimination Ordinance, it is unlawful for a student, staff member or office-holder of an educational establishment to sexually harass a student, staff member or office-holder of the same establishment") — this is a legal basis the EOC restated to the Legislative Council, not a newly enacted rule^※.

The EOC also built up a supporting training system in stages: an online training course on preventing campus sexual harassment was already launched in 2007; in 2020 the EOC worked with UGC-funded institutions to produce a new training course, which was rolled out for institutions to use in 2023, with a similar course introduced for non-UGC-funded institutions in early 2024^※. In other words, the training course itself had existed since 2007; what changed after the 2023 orientation-camp controversy was not that a course was created where none existed, but that voluntary adoption by institutions became a requirement that organisers complete it.

---

# Why did PolyU become the last exception during the 2021 wave of "broken successions"?

Between 2020 and 2021, students' unions at several Hong Kong universities fell one after another into a "broken succession" (断庄) state — losing a functioning cabinet — for reasons ranging from no one standing for election, to cabinet resignation, to withdrawal of recognition by the university. According to an October 2021 report, PolyU was, at the time, the only one of Hong Kong's eight UGC-funded universities still to have a normally functioning students' union; HKU's students' union had its recognition withdrawn by the University after its Council passed a controversial motion; HKBU, CityU, HKUST, EdUHK and Lingnan University all had "broken successions" for lack of anyone to take over the cabinet; and CUHK's students' union had already dissolved following cabinet resignation^※.

Eight universities, seven vacancies, and PolyU the sole exception — this configuration meant that, for the new academic year in 2021, PolyU was the only institution in Hong Kong still able to organise a "big O" under the students'-union name. But the union's continued existence did not mean orientation activities went ahead as usual: because of the pandemic and multiple universities' "broken successions," none of the eight universities held students'-union-level orientation camps for the 2021 new academic year; at PolyU that year, neither the students' union nor its affiliated societies held in-person orientation camps, and different student organisations instead held online or in-person orientation activities as they saw fit^※. Lingnan University's situation in the same year offers a point of comparison: at least four orientation activities run by students'-union-affiliated organisations moved online, at a cost of more than HK$200,000 in losses^※ — a figure that is a reminder that the shift from in-person to online orientation was not merely a change of format, but a real financial loss for affiliated societies that relied on orientation camps to recruit new members.

The full context of the "broken succession" phenomenon itself — why students' unions at university after university lost the willingness to take over the cabinet, and its relationship to the campus political climate after 2019 — is covered in "Chronicle of Broken Successions: Cabinet Resignations and the Wave of Broken Successions." This article does not repeat that account and focuses only on its direct effect on the organisation of orientation camps.

---

# When PolyU's students' union dissolved in 2022, who took over responsibility for organising orientation camps?

PolyU's position as the "last bastion" did not last long. In January 2022, the University asked the students' union's 28th cabinet to sign, by 31 January, an agreement authorising the union's continued use of "The Hong Kong Polytechnic University" in its name. According to a HK01 report, the External Vice-President and two External Secretaries formally resigned to the Council at 9pm on 27 January — under the students' union's constitution, if two of the three offices of President/Vice-Presidents and the Financial Secretary are vacant at the same time, the cabinet is automatically dissolved; on this occasion, a long-standing vacancy in the Internal Vice-President's post combined with the External Vice-President's resignation triggered the automatic-dissolution condition, and the Council Chairperson subsequently became Chairperson of an interim executive committee to keep operations running^※. According to another HK01 report, the students' union held a General Meeting on 30 January and voted by a large margin against signing the agreement proposed by the University^※.

Three months later, the University formally withdrew recognition of the students' union on 14 April 2022, requiring it to stop immediately using organisational names containing "The Hong Kong Polytechnic University" and to vacate the students'-union building by 15 July that year; a former union president estimated that more than 80 student organisations were affected^※. The union reorganised in May of that year under the name "Red Brick Society" (红砖社), and held a General Meeting in June to vote on a dissolution motion: the result was 101 votes for, 92 against, and 17 abstentions — short of the three-quarters-of-those-present threshold required for dissolution, so operations were suspended rather than the union formally dissolved^※. 101 to 92 — a fairly close vote, indicating that even after the union had lost University recognition and the use of its premises and name, a substantial proportion of members still wanted to preserve the organisational structure rather than dissolve it outright. According to a Wen Wei Po report dated 17 March 2023, the Red Brick Society's Council subsequently announced it would hold another General Meeting on 30 March that year to revote on the dissolution motion^※. This site was unable to find a public report of that vote's outcome, so whether the Red Brick Society has formally dissolved remains unconfirmed as of this site's fact-checking; this is stated as unverified, without inference. The full details of this dissolution process are covered in "Chronicle of Broken Successions" and "Cabinet Finances and the Transparency Dispute."

What did this sequence of changes mean for orientation camps? The "big O" level of orientation, previously organised by the students' union, lost its organising body — PolyU no longer had a University-recognised organiser able to call on the whole new-student cohort under the students'-union name. That gap was filled along two lines afterwards: departmental- or faculty-society-level "small O" camps continued to operate; and the University administration (the Student Affairs Office) stepped in directly, becoming the effective authority approving orientation-camp content after 2023. Three years earlier, PolyU had been the "last university in Hong Kong with a students' union"; three years later, the highest level of coordination for its orientation camps had shifted entirely from student self-governance to administrative approval.

---

# What exactly did PolyU commit to during the 2023 orientation-camp controversy?

The organisational vacuum left by the students' union's 2022 dissolution was filled just as a territory-wide controversy over orientation-camp sexual harassment broke out in 2023 — except the University, not students, did the filling. According to a Wen Wei Po report from October 2023, from July of that year, PolyU required all orientation-activity organisers to submit an electronic certificate proving they had completed the EOC's online anti-sexual-harassment course before they could hold an event; alcohol was banned across the board at hall orientation camps and other activities (except high-table dinners), with hall tutors present throughout to supervise, and breaches of the guidelines subject to disciplinary action^※.

This set of rules had three layers: certification as a precondition (no course completed, no activity permitted), an expanded alcohol ban (covering hall orientation camps and the great majority of activities), and on-site supervision (hall tutors present throughout). Together, these marked a shift in PolyU orientation-camp regulation from after-the-fact accountability (as with Poon Chung-kwong's proposed disciplinary action in 2004) to a pre-approval gate. By May 2024, according to a Cable TV report, PolyU and HKBU said in response to enquiries that they provided guidelines to student organisations to avoid non-compliant activities, and that the universities would review and revise the guidelines as needed; PolyU explicitly reaffirmed that organisations organising orientation camps must complete the EOC's anti-sexual-harassment course^※ — over the course of a year, PolyU's stated position remained largely stable, with no sign of further tightening.

Over the same period, the EOC kept up pressure of its own: it wrote to Hong Kong's eight UGC-funded universities in June 2023, urging them to require students responsible for organising, running and taking part in orientation camps to receive anti-sexual-harassment training, and offering to help arrange such training; it sent a similar reminder to tertiary institutions again in April 2024^※. The existence of these two letters shows that, even after institutions had progressively put guidelines in place, the EOC still judged it necessary to repeat the reminder annually — a policy's existence and its full implementation are not quite the same thing.

The intensity of institutions' post-2023 responses was not uniform. A comparison across PolyU, Lingnan, HKBU and HKUST, and whether PolyU has published detailed implementation rules of its own, is covered specifically in "Hall Associations and O-Camp: Handling Misconduct, Bullying and Sexual Harassment at Orientation Camps." This article does not repeat that comparison table and focuses only on PolyU's own timeline.

---

# From "hidden O" to certification: what paradigm shifts has PolyU orientation-camp governance gone through over thirty years?

Stringing together the timeline above, the governance logic of PolyU orientation camps has gone through roughly three shifts — not a smooth evolutionary curve:

What this table shows is not the simple, one-directional story of "orientation camps becoming more regulated." PolyU orientation camps during the self-governance period were certainly repeatedly controversial, but there was also a self-correcting mechanism — the General Meeting voting down excessive cabinet spending and checking budget allocation through voting — and the more-than-870 withdrawals in 2001 are themselves evidence that this mechanism was at work. Certificate-based approval during the administrative-formalisation period has indeed closed the regulatory blind spot represented by "hidden O," but as oversight shifted from the students' union to the University, the earlier check provided by member self-governance disappeared along with it. As of this site's fact-checking, PolyU and other institutions that responded to enquiries during the same period had not been found to have published detailed implementation rules for orientation camps^※ (such as an activity-content approval checklist, or a process and timeline for handling violations) — whether the certification requirement alone is sufficient to cover "hidden O"-style evasion remains to be seen.

PolyU's official annual calendar of festivities — Orientation Information Day, the President's Welcome, the Campus Life Festival and so on — has continued to run steadily and stably in recent years, in sharp contrast to the student-self-governance-level orientation camps this article focuses on. The relationship between these two threads is covered in "PolyU Orientation, O-Camp and Campus Festivities (Part 1)."

---

# Further reading

• PolyU Orientation, O-Camp and Campus Festivities (Part 1): From Info Day to Red-Brick Ritual — an account of the current structure of PolyU's official festivity calendar, complementing this article's historical narrative
• Hall Associations and O-Camp: Handling Misconduct, Bullying and Sexual Harassment at Orientation Camps — a dedicated account of post-2023 regulatory detail and the cross-institution comparison table
• Cabinet Finances and the Transparency Dispute — the financial background to the 2001 orientation-budget episode
• Halls, Traditions and Campus Life (Part 1) — hall association organisational structure and the Hall O-Camp
• Chronicle of Broken Successions: Cabinet Resignations and the Wave of Broken Successions — the full process of the students' union's 2021–2022 dissolution

---